Readers share their thoughts and opinions
Letters
Email [email protected]
or write to us at the address on page 5.
Photos are appreciated, letters may be edited.Looking for
boating pals■ As a PBO subscriber for
well over a decade, it was with
great interest I read ‘Day-
sailing delight’ (Letters, PBO
September 2017).
I’m an older guy (72) who
has always loved the sea, and
when I retired I bought a cabin
cruiser which I sailed on
inland water. Sadly my wife
lost interest so I sold the boat
after three years and bought a
large infl atable which, though
fun, was again domestically
unacceptable, so I decided to
cut my losses and buy a
stable sea fi shing kayak.
This worked well until
deteriorating health meant I
resorted to replacing the
kayak with a safe, stable,
roomy boat that’s easy to
move around.
My purchase was a Takacat,
a relatively new design of
infl atable catamaran from New
Zealand, which can be carried
in my car, can be rowed if I’m
feeling up to it, and is fi ne for a
small engine for longer cruising.
My problem is that I’d like to
fi nd other like-minded sailors
with maybe slight physical
disabilities who’d like good
company whilst sailing their
craft and in doing so have
great banter on many
topics. But I can’t fi nd any
club or association, anywhere
in Scotland (I live in
Edinburgh) that caters for this
group of people.
There must be hundreds, if
not thousands, of older,
relatively active, people out
there...
Grahame Wear
EdinburghFinding your
way around
■ Trying to fi nd an article in
the 60-plus PBO’s I have on a
shelf, I thought what is needed
is an index system.
So with a pile of plastic
sleeves and a ring binder, I
removed all the contents
pages and slipped them into
individual plastic sleeves. It’s
so much easier to leaf through
60 pages in a ring binder than
sift through 60 magazines!
Total cost r3.50.
Chris Othen
CyprusDavid Pugh says: You can
also fi nd many PBO articles
listed online. Visit pbo.co.uk
and click ‘search now’ under
PBO Copy Service. It’ll help
you fi nd the issue and page
numbers.What lies beneath?
■ The yard at which I’m renovating my yacht Anne Marie recently
euthanised an ancient wooden yacht. They removed the two and
a half tonne lump of iron keel and this is what they found.
Note that the top of the keel bolts all appear to be in relatively
fi ne fettle – indeed most of the bolts undid with little bother.
A couple, however, were more trouble and sheared off.
There were, I think, nine (possibly 10) keel bolts holding this on
and every one is corroded to almost nothing.
Owners of boats with keel bolts need to be aware and take heed
that what you see is not
necessarily what you get.
Mike Stephens
Tenterden, KentKipling wasn’t exceedingly fond of sailing
■ I can’t identify Marcus
Tylor’s grandfather’s boat
(Letters, PBO September
2017) which looks too big
for a private pleasure yacht- a barque-rigged sloop,
she must be at least 100
feet long. But I can shed
some light on Rudyard
Kipling, whom Mr Tylor’s
mother remembers seeing
photos of on a cruise to
Egypt shortly before WW1,
and his attitude to boats.
Although he wrote
prolifi cally about the sea,
and had close connections
with the Royal Navy,
Kipling went to sea to
gather material, or to get
somewhere. Only rarely did
he go yachting, and then
only to be sociable and
please his children (he took
them on trips with his friend
and fi nancial advisor, the
London stockbroker Barclay
Harper Walton, aboard his
steam yacht, the Bantam,
between 1905 and 1911).
Kipling didn’t sail for
pleasure, and wrote to a
friend: ‘I hate yachts and nets
of slimy fi sh fl opping about
the deck.’
Kipling did travel to Egypt in
February 1913 as a passenger
aboard the P&O liner the
SS Persia, embarking at
Marseilles. He then travelledup the Nile on the
SS Rameses III,
owned by Thomas
Cook. This kind of trip
to the only recently
peaceful Egypt was
fashionable during
British winters,
between the Battle
of Omdurman in
the 1898 (or
Kitchener’s
machine-gun
massacre,
revenge for the
death of Gordon
at Khartoum,
depending on
your view of
Empire), and the
First World War, in
which Kipling lost
his only son John.
Could it be that the
photographs Mr Tylor’s
mother recalls seeing were
taken aboard the Persia or
the Rameses III in 1913,
and not on great
grandfather’s yacht?
Rupert Maas
Camberwell, Londonup the Nile on the
SS Rameses III
owned by Thomas
Cook. This kind of trip
to the only recently
peaceful Egypt was
fashionable during
British winters,
between the Battle
of Omdurman in
the 1898 (or
Kitchener’s
machine-gun
massacre,
revenge for the
death of Gordon
at Khartoum,
depending on
your view of
Empire), and the
First World War, in
which Kipling lost
his only son John.
Could it be that the